2016 Southern Festival of Books

Reporter Daniel Connolly spent the 2012-2013 school year at Kingsbury High School in Memphis, where Latino teenagers make up nearly fifty percent of the student population. The Book of Isaias is his account of that year.

“I’ve missed the Southern Festival of Books only twice since its founding twenty-eight years ago, and I carry with me many of the voices I first heard there. They are a witness to the shared lives of so many who’ve gone before us, and their voices—their testimonies—remind us as writers and readers to carry on, to keep adding new voices to this celebration.” Poet Jeff Hardin kicks off the Southern Festival of Books, which runs today through Sunday at Nashville’s Legislative Plaza. Festival events are free and open to the public.

Beth Macy’s Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother’s Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South tells the tale of young African-American boys taken from their sharecropper family in Virginia and made into a circus sideshow that toured the world. Macy will appear at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 14-16. Festival events are free and open to the public.

Through a close cultural study conducted in Louisiana, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild sought to explain the deep-seated fears that helped create the current political divide. She will discuss the resulting book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 14-16.

Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination by Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf explores the ideas, times, and misconceptions about a founding father often described as indecipherable. Gordon-Reed will appear at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 14-16.